Posted on 03/03/2010 6:50:50 PM PST by NormsRevenge
SACRAMENTO — State wildlife officials today ruled that the California tiger salamander deserves protection as a threatened species, subjecting landowners to more scrutiny if they want to build or farm in the amphibian's habitat.
The California Fish and Game Commission made the decision after finding roughly 400,000 acres of the amphibian's habitat is threatened by future development and the expansion of farming, mostly in the Central Valley. The tiger salamander lives in nearly half the state's counties, in a region that stretches from Yolo County north of Sacramento to Santa Barbara County.
"We have learned over the years, at our peril, that remoteness is no guarantee of conservation," commissioner Michael Sutton said. "What is remote today may well be suburban sprawl tomorrow."
The 3-2 vote came over the objections of the wine industry, business groups and homebuilders, which complained scientists were unable to show accurate population counts for the salamander and had exaggerated how much rural land might be developed in the future.
(Excerpt) Read more at insidebayarea.com ...
Inquiring minds want to know, can rotenone extirpate tiger salamanders from a body of water?
Possibly, IF they even lived in ‘a body of water’.
Tiger salamanders are in the “mole salamander” family.
They are not “aquatic” except for a very brief period at breeding time.
The rest of their time is spent either underground or under forest floor cover.
*Most* salamanders are primarily terrestrial creatures who can also survive in water and/or spend time in it for breeding.
That’s why they’re *amphibians*.
-Newts- spend most of their lives in water except for their terrestrial juvenile stage.
Why on earth would you advocate the wholesale killing of these animals, regardless of where they live?
You would kill innocent creatures whose only ‘crime’ is that liberal morons have put them in the nexus of a crisis not of their own making?
Take it out the liberals; not the animals.
They didn’t get any choice in this.
.
Their people/tax payers are starving and farmers out of work because of eco-commies...and these idiots are worried about a worm with legs??
How much longer do their citizens endure these mindless cons?
All I meant by my comment was to draw attention to the law of unintended consequences. I do not live in California nor do I have any personal desire to kill these cute little animals.
However, the more draconian the rules become to protect them, especially when they place the burden of doing so on individual landowners instead of society as a whole, the more likely that precautionary killing will take place. A guy whose great-great-grandfather homesteaded a farm in this area a hundred and fifty years ago, and who knows no other life than farming, has a mighty powerful incentive to make sure that there are no salamanders within ten miles of his place.
IMO, this whole issue probably has diddly-squat to do with some little critter or other.
It’s all about -control-.
I don’t know if you recall but years ago, the animal wackos were caught planting the droppings of some Lynx somewhere out west *just* to claim an “endangered population” of them “lived there” to stop logging [I think it was] and that there were actually no Lynx there at *all*.
I suspect that this is just more their “population control” designed to make life miserable for people until they can eradicate enough of *us* to “return earth to its former Edenic state”.
[or whatever psychotic Utopian delusion it is that they’re harboring]
As far as the mole salamanders go, sure, clear cutting/burning a forest would devastate them but anything short of that, they’d adapt.
I used to have a fish-free bog above my house that served as a heavily used breeding place for all sorts of amphibious critters.
My dad decided he wanted to turn it into a catfish/blue gill pond so he did.
For the first few years, the amphibs came as always to breed but their spawn were quickly eaten by the fish.
Now they trek *up* the mountain to another pond he’s made primarily as a deer watering source [sans fish] and breed there, instead.
Since mole salamanders have ~very~ predictable and obvious breeding seasons and habits, it would be painfully simple just to collect up a healthy number of them and relocate them elsewhere.
It’s not as though you have to round them up and rope them or anything.
They walk pitifully slow and it’s very easy to just bend down and pick ‘em up.
I’ve picked more Eastern Spotted Salamanders off of the ancestral breeding trail on the mountain top than I care to try and count, just to keep them from being run over, en masse, by uncaring ‘burb drivers.
You rarely see them crossing up there any more but I’ve got *lots* of them waddling around here on rainy, *very* early cold spring nights.
[and I’m just one broad with a flash light and a bucket...imagine what a volunteer crew of “animal rights” loons could accomplish]
The obviously-too-simple solution would be to have the farmers allow the animal loons access to the salamanders when they come above ground to breed, scoop them up and just take them to another place.
The salamanders won’t give a crap where they breed and they’re not going to sit around grieving for their “old family lands”.
I doubt that will happen though because it involves *co-operation*; not coercion and control.
Most real farmers are in tune with their land and would not intentionally upset the balance any way...unless some nature nazi comes along and forces them to *not* do what they wouldn’t have, in the first place.
Then the “war” starts and I think ~that’s~ the whole point.
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